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Maple Leafs: Free-falling squad has long way to go to measure up to NHL’s best: Feschuk

With just two regulation wins in their past 19 games and the Blackhawks up next, the Leafs need to find the kind of consistency shown by the league’s elite teams if they’re to remain in the playoff hunt.

"If you want to become an elite team, there’s some pretty good lessons that we should be learning right now,"
Leafs GM Dave Nonis says of his charges. (Vince Talotta / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

It has devolved quickly, this once-promising Leafs season. Six weeks ago, Toronto’s swaggering band of hockey gamblers sauntered into Vancouver with easy smiles and defiant confidence.

They were sitting atop the Eastern Conference standings, riding a three-game winning streak, carrying themselves like legends. And if some of them were at least marginally concerned with their coach’s ongoing doomsaying about how their lax defensive work and feeble puck possession was eventually going haunt them — well, they’d cross that bridge when it needed crossing.

As it turns out, everything started to fray on that day in Van City. The Leafs lost 4-0 to the superior Canucks, and they lost centre Dave Bolland to a severed ankle tendon that continues to sideline him. And in the 19-game stretch from that loss to Thursday’s 6-3 defeat in St. Louis, the Leafs have managed all of two regulation wins.

They’ve free-fallen from first in the East to occupying a three-point lead in the race for the second and final wild-card spot in Friday’s playoff standings.

The bridge, in other words, needs crossing, and the fan base is going cross-eyed with rage. Flashpoint underachievers like winger David Clarkson and defenceman Paul Ranger might want to consider cribbing Councillor Doug Ford and handing out stacks of fresh $20 bills at the entrance to the Air Canada Centre on Saturday night, such is the state of their respective approval ratings on Twitter and sports radio.

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“There’s no time to sit around and pout about how the last 10 games have gone,” said Dion Phaneuf, the captain. “We’ve got to get ready for (Saturday’s game against the Blackhawks). We don’t have time to sit here and worry about the past. We’ve got to take care of the present.”

The present doesn’t promise to be kind. The Leafs are 2-6-1 against the top seven teams in the league standings this year. Heading into Friday’s games, that magnificent septet was headed by the defending Stanley Cup champions from Chicago and rounded out by the likes of L.A., Boston, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Anaheim and San Jose.

The Leafs have a habit of referring to a game against one of those elites as a “measuring stick.” On most nights this season, the stick in question has amounted to a mighty oak towering over Toronto’s sick sapling.

Some in Leafs Nation have been surprised by this. This city was euphoric last spring, after all, when the Leafs came within a few steady minutes from winning a first-round playoff series from the Boston Bruins. The frenzy was understandable and plenty of fun.

But winning three playoff games and coughing up Game 7 in a nerve-less fold-up — maybe not enough of the citizenry got the message that it didn’t mean that the Leafs had established themselves as Boston’s peer. It actually confirmed that the Leafs are a rung or two below the Bruins, one of the league’s top-seven teams four seasons running. GM Dave Nonis, to his credit, has been consistently making a similar point.

“I said it a month ago, ‘There’s still a lot of work to be done if we’re going to become an elite team,’” Nonis said. “What’s happening now is bearing that out. It’s not that you can’t beat those (top) teams. It’s that there’s a level of commitment and a level of compete that’s required to beat them. If you want to become an elite team, there’s some pretty good lessons that we should be learning right now.

“I thought the L.A. game (a 3-1 loss on Wednesday) was the best game we’ve played all year. . . . We need to do that on a nightly basis if you’re committed to being one of those teams. St. Louis, L.A., Chicago — that’s how they play. They play like that every single night. They don’t do it every fifth night.”

Nonis, for one, isn’t about to lose all faith in the team he has assembled, even if he acknowledges the underperformance of, say, its struggling defensive corps.

“As a group defensively . . . the D hasn’t played as well as it’s capable of playing on a nightly basis,” Nonis said. “Some of it’s just pairings, some of it’s confidence, some of it’s guys came off really good years last year and some of them have had a difficult time sustaining that. There’s a lot of different things that fall into it. It’s not that we haven’t seen them play well, because we have. It’s that we haven’t seen them play well enough this year on a consistent basis.”

Could a trade bring a needed change to a dressing room that often seems stumped for solutions?

“I don’t think it’s usually helpful to look for the cavalry coming in. I think you’re better off trying to look for some strength from within,” Nonis said. “That’s step one. Step two is, if changes need to be made, you make them. But they have to make sense long term.”

The off-season deal that brought Bolland here made plenty of sense. And there are those who’ll point to the centreman’s ongoing absence as the fulcrum of this Death-cember spiral. There’s something to it, especially when you pile Bolland’s shelving atop Tyler Bozak’s injuries atop intermittent appearances by Joffrey Lupul, etc.

But the Leafs are running near the league average in man-games lost to poor health. And Bolland, let’s be honest, is one guy, and a second- or third-line performer at that. The bigger problem, if the Leafs are going to make up an obvious talent gap on the likes of the Blackhawks, is collective effort and how to produce it consistently. Sometimes it’s easy to get the idea that the Leafs aren’t always as hard on themselves as they should be.

“Really, if you take the first period out of the equation, I really didn’t think we played that bad of a game,” said Nazem Kadri, by way of example, after Thursday’s loss.

It’s impossible for anyone who watched the game not to patently disagree. It was that bad. But the solace comes in the memory of last season, when a similar squad found some success.

“There’s lots of time. Fifty games left. There’s no reason to panic,” Kadri said Thursday.

Clearly panic isn’t the right option. Then again, it’s worth asking how much more humble pie hockey’s swaggering gamblers need to consume before their easy smiles and defiant confidence are exchanged for death stares and urgency.

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